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Andrea is a character TD who works in Lionhead Studios to improve the animation pipeline with new tools, rigs, solutions, ideas. He was a lightwave user two years ago and moved to maya for production needs and then to XSI.

When it comes to math, sometimes is hard to visualize what you are doing, if you are working with vectors and transformations the debugging process can be slow and tedious, you cannot even use primitives to trace positions and rotations if you are writing scripted operators. My workflow was to write quick run-once scripts in [...]

This post is about writing interactive manipulators such as the transform tool or the newly introduced tweak tool, something XSI doesn’t support in its catalog of plugin types by default, but still possible to develop by going through a crazy round trip. When it comes to real-time plug-ins, XSI allows writing custom operators able to [...]

In my endless search for the best language to script my rigs, sometimes I discover new features of the languages I already use. It happened again a few days ago, while I was reading through MSDN’s JScript reference to see why the “import” statement is protected, hoping again to find an include-like functionality that every [...]

With a minimum of scripting and math knowledge, it is possible to solve big problems just using our imagination (and asking Google for the right things). The first important step is to dissect our big problem into smaller ones, which will not lead to our half-artistic brain crashing. By following this rule, even a big [...]

Usually the common behavior for a character TD is to create rigs in a visual way: pressing buttons, dragging and dropping relationships and so on. Unfortunately this is the most diffused way to approach character rigging, it leads to a few issues and surprisingly, it could be the wrong way to go. Once a character [...]